Slashdot Mirror
Possessed Technology?
gordlea asks: "Has anyone ever had a gadget that has acted in a seemingly possessed manner, or that seemed to have a personality of it's own? We once owned a Panasonic fax/phone/answering machine. This thing was crazy, it would randomly call up people who had called our place recently and play back messages other people had left for us. Occasionally it would even record our conversations and play them back to people who called when we weren't around! So do you have any good anecdotes along similar lines? I'm looking forward to hearing them!"
Chuckie, the art lab's old Mac II-something-or-other, which had a defective power supply. The thing would turn on by itself randomly, and someone changed the startup sound to be "I'm ALIVE!"
May we never see th
Yeah, I had this PC once and it was like beep beep beep... it was awful.
PC LOAD LETTER?!?!!? What the fuck does that mean?!?!?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Despite today's date, this is a true story. If I was going to make something up, I wouldn't have chosen a story this lame.
My grandmother suffered from senile dementia, so she would forget that she was talking to an answering machine. Well, every time it hung up on her, she would call back to yell at my mother (whose voice was on the answering machine message) for hanging up. The end result was that we would leave to go to dinner (yes, I was living with my parents, but I was seven, so it's not forgivable), we would come back and there would be twenty-some messages from her. Well, for about a month after she passed away, any time we would go anywhere, we would come home to find twenty odd messages on the machine. They would all be blank, but it was still kind of creepy.Yep, answering machines seem to be the most commonly possessed household appliances. My parents' machine still gets really strange noisy messages recorded on it at random. They sound like something out of the exorcist... Laughing, moaning, crying, and voices speaking backward. Of course, I could have imagined it all. It was mostly just hissing and white noise. But if you listened closely enough....
A few years ago, my father purchased a big LazyBoy recliner, that would affectionately be nicknamed the "Superchair". A few weeks went by and we were all enjoying the chair when dad wasn't around. Built in butt warmer, vibarating back massager, very nice indeed.
So one day at about 1am I come home from hanging out with the some friends, and pass by the chair to head off to bed.
As I walk past the chair it begins to speak directly to me in a soft, stoic, womans voice.
"Stephen, this is Judy. How are you? I haven't spoken with you in quite sometime."
At this point I freeze, I have never been so scared in my life, a chair, the SuperChair is talking to me, and it seems to know my name. I turn slowly towards the chair, part of me wanted to run as fast as I could out of the house, and part of me want to confront my four legged stranger.
I didn't run, I stood frozen for a few more second and then proceeded slowly to the chair.
No more speaking, but the silence was just a erie. I turned on a small light and began to examine the chair.
Ahah! As it turns out the chair had an answering machine built into the flip-up armrest that my dad must have hooked up to the phone line. We've never had an answering machine, so the thought never crossed my mind. The woman was friends mother called about an offer I made to help choose a CD player system...
One thing we didn't ever figure out, why did the chair start speaking right when I walked past it?
So now sometimes when the wind blows just right and SuperChair is feeling a bit alive, you can hear the words swirling around my living room:
"This is Judy.... This is Judy... This Judy...."
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
I had an OS/2 box that froze up for ten minutes, after which the printer spit out something I wrote a few months before but had never printed.
Is it Halloween yet?
That hasn't been rebooted in 3 months. Does that count?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
This is a short summary of a true story, whether or not the rest of my scientific-based-method friends believe it. I once had a TI-86 calculator type messages to me in the text editor on the calculator. The raw text would appear as if someone was pushing the letters without hitting the "alpha" key twice to lock the letters. So, it looked like a bunch of garbage on the display, sort of like this: E944-0-+23/| My friends would find a garbage looking message on the calculator and hit the alpha key twice, push the sequency of letters on the screen, and messages would come up saying "You must avenge my death. You are my troth. You must kill (insert random person here)" To that effect. We (friends and I) would type questions into the calculator, set it down on the table and stare at it for 2 minutes, and then pick it back up to see the response. Nobody was typing in the messages themselves, and we made sure of this by observing who handled the calculator and what they typed (score 1 for the scientific method). Every time we looked for a response, there was something more written there. One time I wrote in some equations to my calculator for a test, and as I was taking the test I was using those equations. Well, half way through the test my whole equation cheat sheet got deleted and replaced with the words "DON'T CHEAT." A friend sitting next to me looked at me at the same time with a confused look on his face. He asked if something had just happened to my calculator, because his just flashed the words "DIE" on the screen for a moment. Just a tid-bit I thought I'd throw in there. This scared the hell out of everybody, including a few teachers who witnessed the events over a course of 6 months (hopefully those teachers didn't witness those equations I wrote in my calculator ;). The thing that possessed the calculator didn't really say anything useful, just said it's name was "doomood" and it was obviously pretty upset because it wanted my friends and I to go kill people for it.
I eventually started ignoring it, and it eventually stopped typing messages on my calculator.
I'd say in the end, it was both entertaining and scary to everyone who encountered it. Some people don't believe the store (I'm sure some of you are like that) but everyone who was a first-hand witness won't deny it. Freaky TI-86's. Thank goodness I upgraded to the 89.